The Prometheus Man

by Scott Reardon

  He was quiet for a minute.

  Then he got up and walked to the bathroom. When he came out after his shower, he started packing his things. Silvana was already dressed and packed. She sat on the same chair where she’d been naked fifteen minutes ago and stared at the floor.

  When he was done, she grabbed her stuff and walked to the car. Before he left, he stopped and looked at the teardrops she’d left on the table.

  He wiped them up.

  They crossed into the Berlin city limits after two hours of silence. Silvana had barely looked in his direction.

  There was a pileup on the eastbound beltway, so they went west. Once they turned off the highway, there were people outside, families walking around, the signs of everyday life. Back at the motel, it’d felt like he and Silvana were the only people in the world. Now surrounded by this, they seemed like what they were—two people who barely knew each other.

  Before stopping outside the address she gave him, Tom braked at one end of the street and looked around. Silvana turned toward him, but when she saw he was looking at the street and not her, she turned away again.

  Everything seemed normal, so he idled up to the curb in front of the building. He noticed the door to the main entrance was protected by a thick metal gate with a security camera next to it.

  Silvana waited for a good ten seconds. When he didn’t say anything, she hopped out of the car and yanked a grocery bag with her things out of the backseat. Then she leaned into the passenger window.

  He started to say something right as she started to say something.

  “Sorry, go ahead,” he said.

  “I just wanted to say…thank you. For getting me here and everything.”

  “Least I could do.”

  Her arm was on the window. He could touch it if he wanted to.

  “Where are you going from here?” she said.

  “I don’t really know yet.”

  “I hope you find…” She stopped herself. “I hope things work out.”

  “I hope they work out for you too.”

  She smiled, but it was polite, like they had already parted ways.

  “I suppose I should…” She turned and looked back at the apartment building.

  He nodded, already agreeing.

  “I should let you go,” he said.

  “Yeah…”

  “All right.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  “Drive safe.”

  “Like I did in Paris.”

  She laughed.

  “All right.”

  “All right.”

  Half-wave.

  Half-wave.

  And she was gone.

  Tom turned the corner and pulled to a stop. He looked at the passenger seat, then around the rest of the car. When she was in it, the car had been this little world. Now he saw it for what it was: a stolen piece of crap.

  He rested his head on the steering wheel. Two things floated up inside him. Already he missed her. And in a couple of hours, he was going to kill her father.

  CHAPTER 37

  Bogasian watched Silvana go into an apartment building. Tom waited until she’d disappeared inside, then turned the corner and pulled over suddenly. His head sank against the steering wheel. He must be exhausted, Bogasian thought.

  When Tom drove off, Bogasian didn’t follow.

  Tom needed a rifle. Plan A had been to go to one of the local shooting clubs, which were to Germans what Elks Lodges used to be to Americans, and request a lesson. He’d ask for something bigger than a .22 and then just run out with it. But this would involve the police, not to mention stealing from people who shot guns for the hell of it.

  The gun show in Magdeburg, however, would not.

  Still he needed a permit, which was a problem. And he wouldn’t be able to buy the gun right then and there, only order it for future delivery, which was an even-bigger one.

  It took him an hour trawling the comments section of gun websites before he found a way around this. And a couple hours after that, in the conference wing of the Best Western in Magdeburg, he arranged an order for a Blaser 30-ought-6 from a private seller. And this private seller arranged for Tom’s future delivery to take place fifteen minutes later in the parking lot. The issue of a permit didn’t come up.

  On the drive back, he got off the highway and trudged through some woods until he found a clearing. He marked a tree and fired at it a few times, each time correcting the sights. The gunshots were loud, but no one came to check them out.

  Back in Berlin, he scoped out the building Silvana had gone into. It had eight stories, and there was a nine-story office building across the street. It was now 5:35, and since in Germany, when the work day ends at five, the work day ends at five, the office building was probably empty.

  Tom waited twenty minutes. No one came out. He checked the front of the office building. There was a security station in the lobby. No guard. He tried the door. Locked.

  He went back to his car and got the rifle case and the briefcase with the files. In the alley behind the building, he threw both over the security fence and then scaled it. He found a fire door to the office building that required a key card for entry. The door handle didn’t have latches, so he guessed the door was locked shut with two large magnets.

  He put both hands through the handle and yanked so hard the door twisted. It was a trick he’d learned at Johns Hopkins while Eric was there. So long as the magnets touched directly, they could withstand anything, but when you bent the door, you bent the magnet—and took the magnetic fields out of alignment.

  The door popped open, vibrating in his hands.

  He walked into a hallway lined with fluorescent lights. He passed by the elevator. It would likely have a security camera, and there was the off-chance some workaholic was still in the building. So he lugged everything up the stairs to the roof.

  The sun was low, and the sky had flipped—blue to orange. As he looked over the neighborhood, he saw long triangles of shadow and sunlight that interlocked like a gigantic backgammon board.

  Silvana’s family’s building was, as best as he could tell, made up of luxury condos with one unit per floor. The part of the building he faced was basically floor-to-ceiling window, so he was able to see the living room and kitchen of each unit as the lights came on. There was no sign of Silvana.

  He opened the CIA files and flipped through the pictures of Alan Sarmad and the other men responsible for Eric’s death. He ended on Dr. Nast. He would have traded all the others for Nast.

  He shot Eric. Point-blank. In the head.

  And Tom didn’t really give a shit why.

  He knew he should ask about what had been done to him. He was sick and getting worse. But he didn’t want the man who shot Eric to ever give him anything, not even the truth.

  And anyway from what he’d seen in the photos, the prognosis was obvious.

  More lights came on in Silvana’s building. There was a family with a cat on the fourth floor and another with a small child on the fifth. The lights on the top floor came on. An attractive older woman stood paused on the edge of the living room with her fingertips still on the switch. Something on her mind.

  The resemblance was obvious, even through the scope of a hunting rifle.

  Silvana walked out of a hallway that fed into the living room. She was about ten feet below eye level with him. Her mother followed her into the kitchen, and while Silvana dug around inside a box of crackers, her mother pulled ingredients out of the cupboards. Tom could see their lips moving as they talked.

  Every time the older woman walked past Silvana to get something, she trailed her hand across Silvana’s back until the distance pulled it off. Silvana was hunched over her crackers, shy almost. She didn’t notice when her mother stopped whatever she was doing to watch her.

  He leaned against the ledge and waited.

  The sun still hadn’t set. It loitered on the horizon. Inside the penthouse, a man came in the front door
. Silvana saw him and stopped.

  He stopped too.

  Neither one of them said anything. Tom couldn’t see Silvana’s face, but when the man moved part of the distance toward her, she was already covering the balance.

  They hugged hard. No patting or swaying—just her face pressed into his shoulder. Silvana’s mother came over. The man looked at her over Silvana’s shoulder, and they both stood watching each other.

  As the sky flipped back—orange to dark blue—Tom looked at Nast’s photo. He ran a fingernail over the twisted scar on Nast’s hand. Then he popped a magazine in place.

  German law only allowed two cartridges per magazine, so he chambered a third round. Next he shouldered the rifle and placed one elbow on the ledge. He used eyesight alone—the poor man’s approach—to determine distance. At 100 meters, you could see another person’s eyes. At 200 meters, facial detail was still recognizable. Only at 300 meters did the target’s face become blurred.

  Tom had unusually good eyesight—always had—and could see Silvana’s face as well as her mother’s. He estimated he was a little over 150 meters away. He erred on the aggressive side because underestimation meant the wind would have more time to act on the bullet. Since he didn’t have a wind instrument, he looked up the wind speed in the area on his phone. Twenty-four kilometers per hour, which he converted to fifteen miles per hour. But it was picking up. Already he could hear nothing of the city below. He made a few lateral corrections.

  Now he put his eye to the scope and Alexander Nast in his crosshairs. Nast was standing, listening to someone. Tom panned over to Silvana, who seemed to be in the middle of a story. She was talking with her hands.

  The wind picked up even more. Tom made another lateral correction and waited for a clear shot. Through his scope, he stared at Nast.

  From a world away, I came from nothing.

  And I found you.

  Nast walked into the kitchen and then back into his sights. He was only three meters from the window. Tom took a deep pull of air, held it, and let it out slowly. He was more accurate on the exhale. His hand flexed. He thought it was the chill of the wind, so he waited a moment and then put the hand back on the rifle. But it flexed again, harder this time. It was starting to shake, not a lot yet, but he knew it was going to be bad.

  He unshouldered the weapon and leaned against the concrete ledge. He started breathing and balling his hand up, breathing and balling up. He squeezed his eyes closed. When he opened them, his hands were calm. He looked at them. Dead calm.

  He got back in position. But when he looked through the scope this time, he saw Eric. Eric was watching Silvana and her family. Tom jerked his eye off the scope. When he looked again, Eric was still there. Only now he’d turned and was staring back at him.

  Like he was trying to tell him something.

  CHAPTER 38

  Karl met James at the airport, and they were able to take off within the hour. It was a short flight: the plane had barely leveled before it began descending. On the ground, they got in the car James had arranged, and since they were armed and had no right to be, they obeyed the advisory speed limit all the way to the penthouse.

  Taking aim with the rifle, Tom knelt with his elbows resting on the ledge. He breathed gently against the wood stock, feeling it rise and fall with his body, until the rifle became an extension of him.

  Looking through the scope, he panned to Nast, but a curtain had been pulled partway closed. He could still see into the apartment, but now he could only get a twenty-foot view of a sixty-foot scene.

  A shadow would float across the length of the curtain, and Silvana would pop out, pick something up, and disappear. Sometimes two shadows would converge. Then one would head toward the open part of the window, and he’d follow it in the scope, waiting for Dr. Nast to appear in the window. But he never did.

  So Tom flipped the strategy. He left the rifle pointed at the uncurtained part of the window and waited for Nast to come to him. It took almost twenty minutes, but finally Nast rocked into and back out of view. He scooped up two dirty glasses on the coffee table, too fast for Tom to react.

  But there was still one glass left.

  Tom set his finger on the trigger and the crosshairs on the approximate area where Nast’s head would be as he reached for the glass. A shadow sped along the curtain. Tom took a deep breath and exhaled. And as he did, he put a few pounds of pressure on the trigger.

  The shadow got closer to the edge of the curtain. There was the streak of a person in motion. At the table, the streak stopped, and the motion lines ran together into the shape of Nast’s head. Tom put a little pressure on the trigger. He could feel the bone in his finger against the metal—

  He thought of Silvana sitting naked on the chair, her bare leg so smooth it almost looked wet. He thought of her smiling as she talked to the street vendor in Nice.

  He couldn’t do it.

  Nast wiped lipstick off the glass.

  Looking at him, Tom just couldn’t do it. He took his eye off the scope and collapsed against the ledge. He sat still. After a minute, he picked up the rifle and looked through the scope again—

  There was a little red dot.

  On a black power box above the window Nast stood in, there was a piece of black tape that had come loose in the wind. A red light flickered through it. It hadn’t been there a second ago.

  What he was looking at wasn’t a power box.

  Raising the rifle, he turned and searched the adjacent buildings through the crosshairs. On a building across from Nast’s and two buildings down from his own, he saw something and froze.

  There was a figure on the roof, the man from the autohof.

  The man was aiming in his direction. There was a lighter-size flash from the gun in his hands, and then Tom’s neck was wet. He fell to his knees and dropped his rifle on a mound of gravel, expanding it. He ran his fingers along his neck, feeling for a hole to plug. But all he found was a gash through the side of his neck. He grabbed the rifle and scrambled behind a vent as the man started rapid-firing.

  Staying as low as he could, Tom aimed at Silvana’s building until he found the black box again. It was held in place by staples. Tom put the crosshairs of his scope on one of them and squeezed the trigger. The box jumped a little, like it wanted to fall, but the staple held. He shot again, and again the box jumped. But still the staple held.

  He reloaded twice and fired as fast as he could until he had only one cartridge left. This was his last chance. He took dead aim. He was going into his exhale when the box exploded.

  There was a crack in the air like the sky had split down the middle. When he took his eye off the scope, the corner of Silvana’s building was scarred with black char. Wind was bending the tower of smoke coming off it, and a fire was burning at the sky.

  Suddenly he got a warm soup feeling across his stomach. When he looked down, he saw blood running from his midsection into his crotch. The next thing he saw was the sky—he’d collapsed on his back.

  In the time it took for him to lift his head up, the man from the autohof was landing on the rooftop of the building next door. He’d left the rifle and opened fire with a handgun. He didn’t break stride as he ran right off the side of that building and onto Tom’s roof.

  Tom clawed at the briefcase and crab-walked behind the roof entrance, out of the bullet spray.

  The action on the man’s gun snapped open with a metallic echo. He must have been empty because Tom heard him drop the gun on the gravel.

  Blood was dripping off the corners of Tom’s clothes and disappearing into the little gravel rocks. He balled up part of his shirt and tried pushing it into the wound. But it was taking a lot of energy to do this, and his arms felt like bags of fat hanging off his shoulders.

  He wasn’t sure what to focus on: the man coming to kill him or the blood loss that was going to anyway. He’d collapsed on the gravel with his back against the roof access door, and he couldn’t see the rest of the roof. He realized he hadn
’t heard any movement from the man since he’d dropped the gun. Delicately he twisted around to try to see where he’d gone.

  The man was standing over him.

  He was still—like he’d been watching him for some time. Tom’s eyes dropped to the knife he was holding. The blade was stubby and wide and stuck out of his fist like a chrome fin. Tom tried to rock to his feet, but he couldn’t even get within the ballpark of standing up. He raised his legs to protect himself, but the man kicked them out of the way. It was like getting hit in the thigh with a baseball bat.

  Instantly the man was on top of him. He kept his right hand, which held the knife, high and out of reach. With his left forearm, he mashed Tom’s face into the gravel. Tom squirmed, shaking his head no, no, no over and over until he could get his eyes back on the knife. Then he weakly wrapped his arms around the man to stop him from repositioning.

  The man’s eyes never seemed to move. They just pointed at him with insectile blankness.

  Suddenly the man stood up, taking Tom with him. Two centers of gravity went up. The man sent them both crashing back down. Tom’s head was already bouncing off the ground when an elbow rammed it back down.

  He felt the man’s weight shift. He knew what was coming. He raised his knee and lowered his elbow to protect his side. He braced for the stab—

  At the same time both Tom and the man turned to see the knife was in Tom’s forearm at a shallow angle and not one of his internal organs. It twisted under the skin, stretching the surface of it. But when the man tried to yank it out, Tom wouldn’t let him—because he didn’t want to be stabbed again, because leaving the blade inside him seemed like the only way to stop it from going in somewhere else.